Friday February 27, 2009

Person of the Week - Gail Trimble

A week ago no one had heard of her except the followers of University Challenge . She led her team, Corpus Christie Oxford to win the series. There then followed some rather unpleasant comments about her which I thought were totally out of order. I think it is great she has managed to lead that team and amass the amount of knowledge that I think gave her the all time highest tally of point in the series. The funny thing about this story is that a men's magazine called Nutz contacted her brother ( I don't know how they knew how to do that ) and asked him to provide them with her email address so they could contact her to discuss being in their magazine - which was promised to be 'tasteful'. He declined.

Thatcher's last days

Lindsay Duncan was excellent as Margaret Thatcher in a TV drama last night on BBC. It charted her last days as the Tories kicked her out of office and replaced her with John Major. There were loads of well known supporting actors who also did a great job, the actor playing her husband was especially good. It has been announced she is going to be Doctor Who's sidekick in a program to be screened this year. There is a little more information on the Thatcher program here . The program did not act out the part where Thatcher was driven away from No Ten. The ghostly frozen image of her face behind the glass of her Jag was something to behold.

R.I.P Wendy Richards

After her third battle with cancer Wendy Richards died yesterday . She spent her later years as Pauline Fowler in Eastenders a soap on BBC TV. I must admit it was not my favourite TV program except when Phil and Grant Mitchell knocked seven bells out of each other - a regular occurance when other storylines had dried up. Wendy was also well known as Miss Brahmes in "Are you being served?" a comedy series based in a department store again on BBC TV. Her last TV role as Mrs Crump in Marple: A Pocket Full Of Rye.

Thursday February 26, 2009

Has a deal been done?

Today we have learnt that the old Honda team have been told to prepare for a test in Spain next month. So the rumours are that a management buyout led by Ross Brawn has been accepted by the Honda management. The new unamed team will use Mercedez Benz engines. In other F1 news an American F1 team was launched in the US yesterday and will appear on the grid in 2010.

Was it really that bad ?

I was talking to the students about the men's aftershave/deodorant called Hai Karate yesterday. I even bought a bottle of the stuff years ago and was a bit annoyed that wearing it did not reproduce the same effect as you saw on the advert. Anyway I looked on YouTube for the advert and yes it was as bad as you may remember it - Be careful how you use it...

The allotment queue...

It has been reported today that 150,000 people in the UK are waiting for an allotment. For those outside the UK an allotment is a piece of land you rent from your local council or in my case church on which you can grow your own vegetables. I know from the large allotment site down the road from me that allotments are more popular than ever before as the unused plots on that site have shrunk to zero over the years. So a scheme called garden share already setup in some counties of the UK which encourages those with gardens who don't have the time/knowledge to use that space to grow vegetables to share them with those waiting for a plot is going to be rolled out nationwide. It sounds like a great idea.

Wednesday February 25, 2009

Rome - a short break

Last week we had a short break in Rome. Having now seen the historical buildings especially those dating back to the Roman period I can confirm Rome was not built in a day... Do you know why the city has its name? It all relates to Romulus and Remus .

Anyway most people have heard of the major sites and the first we saw was the Coliseum.

The picture does not do it justice. Like all the major Roman buildings it is HUGE. The 'stage' where the fights took place has been excavated to show the cells where the animals/gladiators stayed while they waited for their turn to entertain the crowds. The good news is that travelling to Rome in February the queues were short and it was not boiling hot as it can be in the summer. In fact it was quite chilly. After looking over the Coliseum we walked over to the Forum area where a lot of the remains of buildings exist - sadly not very well signed. Near to this is the Palatine hill where people like Cicero had their flashy houses. In the Forum area was a small monument built by Julius Caesar's wife to indicate the place where he was cremated after being killed. On this monument people had put fresh flowers...

We visited the Pantheon a Roman temple later used as a church. It has an amazing Dome roof. The Roman's were clever devils and they knew how to build the dome using light materials that made the construction easier. Again there were not many people in it so you could enjoy it.

In Rome there are countless churches. Most of the larger ones had fantastic painted walls and ceilings. Unlike other countries they did not mind you taking photos.

Of course the site people always go to is the Vatican city a state within the Rome city. St Peter's is an amazing church, it makes the other churches in Rome look ordinary. You can go to the top of the dome (cuppola). The first part of the journey is by lift. When you get out of the lift you enter the inside of the church and walk around the 'base' of the dome which has a walkway around its perimeter with a high wire fence to stop you or any objects falling onto the people below. You then continue your journey up the dome to a viewing area outside.

Another place everyone goes to is the Sistine chapel. This is part of the Vatican museums. You could easily spend a day looking at the gathered gifts presented to the popes over the years. Once in the chapel no photos are allowed but the painted walls are awsome. There is more information and pictures here . For me the picture on one end wall "The Last judgment " by Michelangelo is just fantastic and I could have looked at it for hours.

So my only downside of this trip was the cost. The pound/Euro rate is not in our favour. We made the fatal mistake of going in a cafe and ordering without seeing the prices. We were fleeced for seventeen Euros for a fanta, coffee and a measly sandwich. To make matters worse the toilets were blocked, smelly and not working. They needed some Roman technology.

A final picture of the Trevi Fountain where you throw money in to ensure you go back to Rome.

All in all a great trip.

Timewatching Lizzies cannons

Excellent Timewatch program last weekend. It was all about the raising of two cannons from the wreck that sunk during England's battle with the French/Spanish during Elizabeth the 1st's reign. The guy raising the cannons believed all the cannons on the wreck had the same bore size and if so proved would bring the date forward when England could produce cannons that could all share the same balls. This was a big development as when loading the cannon you did not have to find the right sized ball. It allowed you to then fire all cannons together increasing their effect on your enemy. At the end of the program they built a replica and fired it to show how good it was. It had a range of a mile! They also raised a musket and built a replica of that and that could pierce a plate of mild steel that a modern gun could only put a dent in.

Tuesday February 24, 2009

Is one hand enough?

Today I learnt that their had been complaints that children have been traumatised by the appearance of a CBBC presenter who only has one hand. I understand if a child sees someone like this that they might be upset but it is up to all of us to educate children about this stuff. We so often hear about racial, political, gender and all the other discriminations but the disabled always seem to be at the bottom of peoples interest in solving these problems.

I had thought we had moved on a step or two after the success of our people in the Olympics but perhaps we have not come far enough. I cannot find any links on this story either.

Greenways - Open after five and five

After five million pounds and five years Agatha Christie's house in Devon Greenways is open for visitors again. The National Trust have done fantastic job based upon the shots I saw on Breakfast TV this morning. There are plenty of her belongings and there is also a "Greenways" edition of all her books on display. I am sure the house will be very popular.

Monday February 23, 2009

Eight out of ten for Heathrow's T5

It was with some trepidation that we found out we were flying to Rome from Heathrow's T5. We parked in the T5 long stay car park that was closer to T1/T2/T3 than T5 but the bus did not take us long to wizz us to T5. As you walk in it has an amazing feeling of space. The superstructure is visible and adds volumes to the interior appearance. We were unable to check in as we arrived being to early - I don't know why they do that. So we had a coffee in one of the cafe's which was not badly priced. I would say there is not much in this part of the airport and not many seats. Clearly it is up to the traveler to do a decent job of his timing or face the consequences. Eventually we checked in and went through to the gate. Here there were more seats and shops etc to visit. The interior is quite nicely finished unlike other BAA airports that look so down at heel the day after being built. My only critisism is that the toilets don't have many toilets and here the interior finish was already looking tired.

The shock was when get to the gate we ended up going on a bus to the plane! Have they not built enough gates for BA? You could see an satellite terminal in the same design being built and there is a secondary one already in place. I hope the use of a bus is only until they finish off the building works.

On the way back after the usual Heathrow stacking delays we were told the plane's Aux engine was not working so there would be a delay in getting to the stand. But we were then told after another delay a tracking device had not worked adding to the original delay. It is funny BA never complains when things go wrong at Heathrow. Virgin usually have a good go at the standards of service when problems occur.

While waiting the building in the dark seems like a large electric filament bulb the filament being the superstructure visible from the outside through the glass envelope. Going through Passport control was fine - after a long walk with no moving walkways from the gate. At baggage pickup - a usual Heathrow disaster the problem was ours as we waited by reclaim eight and should have been at ten. When after ten minutes we walked to ten our bags were there. The courtesy bus arrived minutes after we got the its stop and soon had us back to our car.

Friday February 20, 2009

How many users can you get on a lab box ?

Virtualisation holds much promise for me as a lab manager. In the lab we are taking two approaches. The exciting thing is the speed at which this technology is advancing - it is honestly difficult to keep up! Here is one of our solutions.

In our environment an engineer books a server, loads his OS of choice and and additional software and tries to reproduce the customer problem he is having. The engineer may want extra hardware added like a fibre card and associated storage. In that case - for now virtualisation is not for them. Of course there is a 'delay' waiting for the OS to install because you do not know what has been done to the OS the previous user left behind. We are taking a T5240 server with 64gb of memory and using LDOMS. You define a control domain and use enough internal disks to make a ZFS pool which will be used for the LDOMS boot disks. In our case the control domain has eight VCPU's, a decent amount of memory and so on. We then define a set of identical LDOMS. Each LDOM is given two 'blank' ZFS volumes that the LDOM sees as internal boot disks. The engineer can then install/configure the OS however they wish. We give them two disks so they can do mirroring, upgrades etc. Then using ZFS snapshots/clones each LDOM has another disk with say Solaris10U6 on it which we can then 'refresh' back to a known good clean state after the engineer finishes with it. The neat thing is of course there is no install time to wait for.

All the consoles of these LDOMS are available to users and it just feels like any lab box. We don't give engineers access to the control domain as they might end up messing up their/other folks LDOMS. We do have to provide an ability to reset LDOMS as if the engineer does a 'init 5' the LDOM will be off until it can be started by a priviledged user.

The trick of course is to get engineers to use this instead of traditional machines. We can eliminate several large servers like V880 saving space, power and cooling. We will have to keep some of these servers for product support and their smaller brothers like the V240 for when engineers want cards inserted as I mentioned above. At the moment we are quite careful on the loading of LDOM's on a server we are only using half the VCPU's/memory of the box. One my next posting on Lab Virtualisaton I will talk about the second solution we are using.

Thursday February 19, 2009

Katie Melua

I knew this female artists name, had possibly heard a track or two but I got to hear her music properly on a flight where she was playing at a concert somewhere in Germany. So I went out and bought Piece by Piece as that had a lot of the tracks featured in the concert. It was an instant hit. She has a wonderful unstrained singing voice as velvety as a glass of Chilean Merlot red wine. She does a few cover versions but her own stuff is the best. The catchy "Halfway up the Hindu Kush" is excellent and hard to get that tune out of your head. She is actually from Georgia and then moved to Northern Ireland and some of her music is influenced by her time in both countries. Her latest album Picture has taken a little big longer for me to appreciate her other cd's were more immediate. For reasons only known to her she did a concert 303 metres under the sea and holds the record for the deepest concert...

Wednesday February 18, 2009

Mobile madness

I do not know who invented the mobile phone but although the device is a very useful object I fear my fellow human beings behaviour when using them is driving me to distraction...

Using the phone when moving. This includes walking, cycling, driving. Human beings cannot do two things at once and using a mobile phone while in motion is a recipe for disaster.

Sending texts that no sense at all [sic]. It seems even easier to send text messages that make no sense especially if single letters are substituted for words like 'r u'.

After a plane lands at an airport the sound of all the phones in the plane being turned on as their owners reconnect to the real world to tell their friends and relatives they have landed and they will be home by ...

Some people seem to think the world needs to witness their conversations with their friends as they discuss marital and other problems. Or even worse discussing in public what happened last night during a rather hectic night on the town..

Someones phone beeping or ringing during a meeting that is quickly followed by an apology..

People who leaving their mobiles in the office while they pop out - the phone then rings and never gets answered. Meanwhile it is annoying everyone in the immediate area..

Another thing that annoys me is when people insist on using their phone when they are in a noisy environment, have a weak signal or when their battery is low. I don't know why they don't wait until they can rectify these problems - all you can hear is a garbled message that you cannot understand.

Now you have read this score yourself. One point for each of the above you admit you do on a regular basis. If you score zero - I am sorry you are lying - try again. Anything under four indicates an average user of a mobile phone. Anything above five means you need help - leave your mobile at home for a few days every week to wean yourself off it.

Tuesday February 17, 2009

A zoo full of stars..

As reported on BBC Breakfast today a website where Joe public can help sort through the billions of galaxies identifying their shapes has been revamped. The site looks fantastic and to me it is a great human based cloud computing initiative. It has also drawn in people who had no interest in this subject and got them learning more about our universe.